The Foundation for the Murdered Jews of Europe announced the death in Kiev on January 11 of Arkadi Moissejewitsch Waispapir.
Born in Southern India in 1921 he was in the Soviet Red Army when captured by invading German troops and sent to the Sobibor camp where an estimated 250,000 Jews were murdered.
Unlike most of the deportees, he was not murdered immediately after his arrival in the gas chambers, but was assigned to the so-called “worker inmates” whose task was to maintain the warehouse operations. He helped to dispose of corpses.
He became one of eight Red Army men led by Jewish officer Alexander Petschjorski (1909-1990) to plan the break-out which was dramatised in the 1987 film Escape from Sobibor.
In the escape the doomed Jews armed themselves with knives, hatchets and captured firearms.
Two hundred people broke out, many of them recaptured and shot or blown to pieces by the minefield surrounding the camp. Forty-seven survived to the end of the war.
Sobibor, on the eastern border of the Lublin district of the General Government, was, with Belzec and Treblinka, one of the three extermination camps of Operation Reinhardt.
The factory-like mass murder of more than 250,000 Jews in Sobibor began in May 1942.
Waispapir, whose entire family was murdered during the German occupation, married after the war and became the father of two sons.
He lived and worked mainly in Ukraine before he settled down in 1994 in the capital Kiev.
On October 14 this year, the rebellion of the prisoners in Sobibor will be commemorated for the 75th time.
Additional reporting by Monika Pallenberg.